One Farm | Smartphone Controlled Farming

Our Application 'OneFarm', allowing farmers to control and automate traveling irrigators on their farm.

Our team members.

Our Business Model Canvas

Judge's Input on Business Model Canvas

We are looking for community partnerships with our app

A screenshot of our app

A screenshot of our app

A screenshot of our app

Please scan QR code using the Blynk App for a demo of our software

We can't wait to come back next year!

Our Team

We're a team of homeschool kids & parents from Devonport & Ulverstone Tasmania. We are from two business families who run businesses in Australia and The USA and we regularly partner together socialy and for business opportunities.

We also has a social media manager Haley Kelly (Age 12) who helped us post our progress on Friday and Saturday.

Inspiration

We love working with Arduino & Raspberry Pi systems & native smartphone apps and using technology to solve real world problems. We've been talking with local dairy farmers in the Merseylea region in Tasmania's Northwest and they're excited to explore technology to make their industry more productive and sustainable.

Today we're pitching a farm management system called ONE FARM which connects a smartphone app to existing farm equipment using Internet Of Things Devices. It’s about giving farmers a quicker and more effective way to control & monitor their equipment & stock saving them time effort and money in farm management.

What it does

“One Farm” will eventually be able to control & monitor multiple functions on a dairy farm however in this Hackathon we’ve concentrated on developing and demonstrating ONLY ONE of these uses, the control & monitoring of travelling irrigators.

The biggest problem our farmers have with their travelling irrigators is that they frequently break down, get stuck, or collide with animals or foreign objects. When this occurs, the travelling irrigator continues to irrigate one section of the paddock which leads to over watering, damage to crops & soil & wastage of precious water resources.

Unfortunately farmers waste too much time, money and effort on old fashioned irrigators which can not currently communicate data and it’s this problem which they have asked us to solve.

One of our main objectives for this project was to create a solution which could be used to retrofit existing irrigators with Arduino controllers as to make the solution affordable for all farmers.

In the pitch video, you will see the irrigator turning on and off, being tracked by GPS and sending push notifications to the farmer with various kinds of alerts.

We want to bring traditional farming into the digital age by integrating existing equipment with the internet of things. ONE FARM will give each farmer complete control of their equipment and resources in a more sustainable way from their smartphone.

How we built it

This weekend the Control Freaks team has developed a demo smartphone app built on the Blynk platform. This controls several functions and the location of the travelling irrigator. We also developed the hardware using Arduino, a 3D printer and an old domestic sprinkler to demonstrate how the real version will work in the field.

Challenges we ran into

Some of our equipment did not arrive in the post in time, but we made do with what we had.

We experienced some technical difficulties integrating old tech with new, but we overcame this.

Some library incompatibilities in our software slowed us down, but we pushed through and fixed it.

We had more vision that we did time, but we delivered a fully working prototype & demo app.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Our two families worked extremely well together and we are proud of each member of our team.

We were proud of Rory (Age 14) for winning the quick pitch on Saturday afternoon (Day 2)

Proud of Jack ( Age 16) for working with code to develop the app and integrate it with the Arduino

Proud of Caleb ( Age 16) for focussing on learning the business process and presenting the Business Model Canvas to the Judge.

We want to thank Raoul for mentoring Jack with the code & Arduino.

We want to thank Tracy for mentoring & project managing us all.

We want to thank Nathan for mentoring the team and helping with the pitch,

What we learned

Not only have we increased our technical skills but we’ve learnt how to take a a concept from a idea through to a working prototype in one weekend. We get on well socially but it was great to see us working well under pressure. We really loved everything on our UHack weekend.

What's next for ONE FARM Smartphone Controlled Farming

From here we will be refining our design, take our concept and developing a native app and start running live trials on two farms who have asked for our assistance.

One farm will eventually become able to control & monitor multiple functions on a dairy farm including:

Irrigation control & monitoring

Electric fence or virtual fencing solutions

Dairy process control & monitoring

Pasture & stock video management

Crop monitoring and management

Stock herding via drone technology

Integration with online weather forecasting

Because of our limited time in this hackathon, in our pitch today we will demonstrate ONLY ONE of the uses which "One Farm" will be capable of, the control & monitoring of travelling irrigators.

Try It Out

To see our interface, you can download the Blynk App from the Apple store, or Android Playstore and scan the QR code in the gallery, which is available here to access the app.